Barrios and Bodyguards: Security and Democracy in Latin America.

As Latin America democratizes, ordinary citizens appear less enthusiastic about democracy. What explains this paradox? This paper attempts to fill in the gap between disparate literatures on corruption, urban violence, and democratic orientations by presenting a causal relationship between victimization, corruption, and democratic values. I argue that the increase in criminal activity and perceptions of corruption throughout Latin America may explain part of the variation in democratic orientations and that victims of crime express negative feelings toward democracy and are often have less confidence in political institutions. Using survey data from the 2005 Latinobarometro, I find that victims are indeed less likely to support both democracy as an ideal as well as the political institutions in place while respondents who perceive high levels of corruption are more likely to support democracy but are significantly less likely to support political institutions. Analyses from ordered logit models demonstrate that these results hold across Latin America. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]